Philip II of Spain Doubloons
Topic: Coins and Rare Replicas
Philip II 1598 Doubloon Found at auction
Philip II (1556-1598) inherited from his father, Charles V, the Kingdom of the Two Sicily's and the Duchy of Milan in Italy, Brabant and the possessions in the Netherlands, and the Spanish kingdom and its overseas colonial empire. By then the Spanish Empire had reached its peak. Nevertheless, Philip II, a severe and autocratic person, had a long and troubled reign. Under his intolerant rule, the freedom loving Dutch began a long and bitter struggle for freedom

Salvaging The Coins, England's support for the Protestant Netherlands, Philip, who had been married, 1554 to 1558, to Mary Tudor, Queen of England (1553-58), decided to attack England. His "invincible Armada" suffered in 1588 a crushing defeat in the waters of the English Channel. The destruction of the Armada resulted in the sinking of thousands of Doubloons later salvaged & marked the beginning of a slow but steady downfall of Spain's prestige and power.

During the reigns of Philip II's successors, his son Philip III (1598-1621), and his grandson Philip IV (1621-1665), Spain slumped from her former dominance and entered a long struggle for survival as a world power. Spain suffered also reverse on the battlefields with grave consequences: the loss of Portugal, of the Netherlands and the northern provinces of Spain; and the rebellion in Catalonia and Naples. Neither Philip III nor Philip IV was competent to give the kind of clear direction of which Philip II in his prime had been capable. The fate of Spain was increasingly tied to the progress of its colonial empire in America. One result of the massive infusion of precious metals from the New World into Spain of that period was an unbelievable increase in prices which eventually spread throughout Europe. During this period Spain produced highly interesting coins. The large multiple silver real pieces of 100 or 500 reales, issued in Saragossa during the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV, and the remarkable coins of Philip II